


Stand Up for You

by lucymonster



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Exhaustion, F/M, Huddling For Warmth, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Self-Harm, Self-Sacrifice, Survival, forced to work together
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-28
Updated: 2019-05-28
Packaged: 2020-01-16 08:51:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,435
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18518071
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lucymonster/pseuds/lucymonster
Summary: Kylo saved Rey's life. Rey saved his. Technically, that makes them even. But now they're stranded with their mutual enemies closing in, and to get to safety, they need to walk.So it's really too bad about his broken leg.





	Stand Up for You

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LearnedFoot](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LearnedFoot/gifts).



Rey's vision is blurred, her tear ducts working overtime to fight the haze of dust and smoke that blacks out the sky. Flames lick higher up the hull. If they hit the power core while she's this close, the rescue unit will be lucky to find shreds of her. But she can't run for cover. Palms blistering from the heat of the metal, she wrenches the hatch door off its twisted hinges.

'Ben! Ben, are you okay?’

He's slumped in the pilot's seat. Still conscious, though he’s slow to stir, gazing blearily at her through a curtain of bloodied hair. There’s a corresponding red smear on the dashboard where he must have hit his head. The overheated engine groans – no time now to catalogue his injuries. Get him out. Get clear of the crash site. Everything else can come after.

The question spills out anyway. ‘Why, Ben? What were you _doing_?’

No answer. He’s dead weight as she hauls him out of the cockpit. Her shoulders strain. The hull groans and buckles. Smoke sears her lungs, and she’s dragging his body over charred, rocky ground towards the outcrop that’s their only hope of cover when the volatile twin ion engines blow clear of the mangled chassis. They make it to the outcrop with moments to spare. The TIE explodes, its shockwave rippling out across the ground to claim what’s left of Rey’s downed X-wing in its own crash-site crater a hundred yards away.

She props Ben upright against the rock. His dead weight act is not a good sign.

Even now, with time to think, Rey’s not sure exactly what just happened or why. They’d been dogfighting in open space, far above the planet’s surface, and one of her shots had hit Ben’s thrusters at the same time as hard atmosphere had hit her shields with none of her landing systems engaged. She’d spun out. There was noise and adrenaline and an earth-shattering lurch, and no time to protect herself or eject from the cockpit. Barely time to do more than brace in her pilot’s chair. But as their wrecked ships hurtled towards the ground, she’d felt something: a surge of power in the Force that didn’t belong to her. The lurching had calmed. The world had gone still. At the last split second, as the planet’s surface came up hard on them, Rey’s velocity had slowed –

 _I’m sorry_. She’d heard it as clear as a voice right beside her. _Please don’t think too badly of me._

– Ben’s hadn’t.

And now they’re here, and Ben looks a few untreated moments away from lapsing into coma.

Only a few moments ago, she was firing on him with intent to kill. Now all she has room for in her mind is the frantic scramble to keep him alive.

Frantic and possibly doomed to fail. Rey knows how to fend for herself, but she’s not first aid trained. The field knowledge she’s picked up from her naval-trained Resistance allies hasn’t done much more than replace her old survivor’s confidence with a swirling cloud of complex health risks she knows she’s not equipped to handle. If Ben’s dehydrated from the heat then he needs water, but if he’s in shock then he needs nil by mouth. Clear airway seems a safe bet either way, so she rips open the collar of his tunic and watches his throat bob like a buoy on the waves as he sucks in breath after needy breath.

The head wound she’d feared is only split skin, already clotted over. He could be concussed, but she can’t help that so she doesn’t waste time trying. Focuses instead on staunching the bleeding from the gash where a piece of mangled ship’s metal pierced his chest. She puts pressure on the wound, sinking her whole weight into the task, so her face is only inches from his when he opens his eyes.

‘Rey,’ he says, voice hoarse and ragged from smoke inhalation.

‘I’m saving your life. Don’t distract me.’

Beneath the pressure of her hands, she feels his chest heave a bit. Hears a breathy, feeble snort. ‘Don’t work too hard. I’m not dying.’

His tone conveys a surprising amount of displeasure at the fact. ‘You could have fooled me,’ Rey snaps. She eases off the chest wound. No fresh blood spurts out, though her palms are red and dripping with it. ‘What the hell is going on up there? Why are all your people trying to murder each other?’

It made no sense when it was happening, and it makes even less sense now with Ben’s blood all over her hands. The Resistance had joined battle on the mid-rim frontline, only to find that the First Order had already started without them. They were fighting each other, dreadnought against dreadnought caught in lethal barrages of friendly fire. Shield-piercing warheads and proton torpedo blasts. When she’d locked onto Ben’s TIE, he’d been chasing his own command shuttle as it tried to escape the carnage.

Ben doesn’t answer. He closes his eyes, and she feels a ripple in the Force as he draws on his power and reaches out. Not to her. Not to anyone or anything that she can see. But whatever power he’s calling on, it eases his breathing and slows the frenetic vibrations of his aura to a slow, stable pulse. ‘The Order will be here soon,’ he says at last. ‘We need to get out of sight.’

‘We?’

With what looks like an enormous effort, Ben jerks his head skyward. Filtered through the planet’s atmosphere, the battle raging above looks like shooting stars in the daytime sky. ‘I’m not on the best terms with my generals right now. I’d rather they not find me while I’m–’ He coughs, face crumpling in pain as the spasms wrack his body. ‘Need to get out of sight,’ he says again. ‘We have to move fast. Help me up.’

Rey pulls her arm out of reach before he can try to use it as a lever. ‘About that,’ she says. It’s been low on the life-threatening priority list. She’s surprised he hasn’t noticed – but Ben has always had a strange relationship with pain, if his past reactions to injury in battle are anything to go by. And there’s certainly plenty of it competing for his attention right now. ‘Your leg. Don’t look just yet, but it’s–’

He looks. The last of the colour drains from his face as the sight helps connect his brain to his forgotten nerve endings. Even Rey, who isn’t physically attached to the thing, feels a bit nauseous when she looks at the sharply bent angle of his foot and ankle to the rest of his leg.

‘I think we’d better get you boot off,’ she says. ‘Before the swelling makes it impossible.’

Ben closes his eyes. For a moment, she thinks he’s going to faint. But when he speaks again, he sounds lucid – and furious. ‘Fuck.’ Another shaky breath. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck.’

 

* * *

 

They walk anyway. They don’t have a choice – it’s walk or die. Rey improvises a splint for Ben’s broken leg, and binds it tight while he grits his teeth and tries to act like he's not about to cry. Hauls him to his feet and drapes his arm around her shoulder, and there’s an awful moment where he tests his weight and the pain flares so sharp that Rey feels it in her own body through the Force. But while she gasps and fights to keep her balance, Ben scrunches his eyes closed and sucks in several deep, forced breaths. Swallows hard like he’s gulping down a revolting dose of medicine.

‘I’m okay,’ he says. And then they walk.

The place used to be some kind of mining site: vast flat shale fields stretch to the horizon, broken only by outcrops of natural formation and hulking skeletons of ancient drill rigs. Loose shards of rock move beneath their feet, shifting and crunching. Rey smells sweat and blood and lingering smoke, hears Ben’s breathing ragged in her ear.

They walk.

It’s hard to measure distance on these endless flats: grey and grey and grey, broken up by red-brown rust and blackened oil spills. Ben’s stubborn, trying to take too much of his own weight, and every time he slips, Rey buckles and lurches under him. He’s heavy. Heavier than a sack of scavenged ship parts, heavier than a week’s water rations slung over her shoulders. He’s getting heavier the more time passes.

They walk.

Rey’s comlink is scrambled, but the tracker seems still to be transmitting. If they can find somewhere safe to wait, her friends will be here with a rescue unit as soon as the shooting stops. What she’s going to tell that rescue unit, she has no idea. _He saved me. He got hurt saving me. No, I don’t know why. No, I won’t leave without him._ That’s assuming the Resistance manage to find them before the First Order do. If it comes to a fight, Rey’s lightsaber is clipped securely to her belt; Ben’s similarly armed, but whether he’ll be fit to stand and fight is anyone’s guess.

They’re passing under one of the old drill rigs, tank rusted open, bare support beams looming high above. There’s a manual control panel in front of what clearly used to be an operator’s seat. If there were people out here once, there’ll have been infrastructure to support them – a miner’s station, a worker barracks, even an old storehouse. Of course, those will be the first things their pursuers come to look for when they realise there are no bodies at the crash site. But inside would be better than outside. While the blood pounds hot in her veins from exertion, Ben’s starting to shiver through all his heavy layers. The clouds overhead don’t bode anything good, and the wind bites sharp at Rey’s sweat-damp skin.

She scans the horizon. More shale, more rust, more nothing. Ben staggers at a slight dip in the ground and the lurch almost knocks Rey over with him. He bites off a noise of pain, muffled and grim.

They walk.

There has to be something soon. A larger, more intact drill rig. An overhang deep enough to shelter under. Anything.

Ben’s shaking harder, slipping more often. He’s not going to make it much further on foot. Rey’s not going to make it anywhere if she has to try and carry him. ‘Tell me what happened with the Order,’ she says, in the feeble hope that distracting him might help her wring out a few extra steps. ‘Why are you all trying to kill each other? Not that I object at all, but it’s not your usual strategy.’

He’s quiet so long that Rey stops expecting an answer. ‘It’s Hux,’ he says at last, as she’s casting around for another topic that might better entice him. He’s out of breath. A little hoarse. ‘He’s always been a power-hungry piece of work. Turns out he’s been building his own faction inside the Order, waiting for the right time to strike. We were mid-mutiny when your fleet arrived.’

‘So it was Hux on that shuttle you were chasing?’

‘Didn’t expect me to fight back so hard,’ says Ben with an audible sneer. ‘Fucking coward. When this is over I’m going to draw out his death until he shits himself from pain.’

Tasteful. But Rey’s approach seems to be working, at least – as the anger sparks fresh, Ben is picking up speed, trembling just as hard but now with Force-fueled hatred rather than impending collapse.

‘People do that under torture sometimes,’ Ben says, just in case Rey has forgotten who it is she’s helping and why it's probably a terrible idea. ‘They do all sorts of things. When there’s too much pain, all your basic functions start shutting down. But you can–’

They’ve hit a sharp slope in the ground. Ben slips and almost falls, and it’s all Rey can do to keep him upright, and when his weight lands on his splinted leg it draws a sound that bears suspicious resemblance to a sob.

‘You can master it,’ Ben forges on, tears welling in his eyes, and Rey decides that he’s not trying to shock her with his stream of violent trivia – he’s trying to cope. This is his sick, twisted way of keeping himself together. ‘Turn the pain into energy, draw on it, nourish the darkness and use it to … to make you stronger...’

‘But you’re not hurting Hux to make him stronger,’ says Rey, the words sour in her mouth. She’s not enjoying this topic much, but she also won’t enjoy it if Ben runs out of steam and stops walking once his surge of angry energy wears off. 'You're just out for revenge.’

‘He doesn’t know how to use it,’ Ben rasps. ‘It’s a skill, takes years of training … you have to push your limits. Hurt yourself in doses till your body learns to take it. Snoke and I…’

Now there’s a topic that exceeds Rey’s limits. ‘I just don’t see what it does for you,’ she snaps – sharper than she means to, but it’s hard to modulate tone when half of Ben’s weight is bearing down on her as a crutch and all he wants to talk about is how his maniac ex-boss convinced him that self-harm was the final word in self-mastery. ‘Tormenting people just for fun. I don’t believe for one second you actually enjoy it.’ She hesitates, weighing up that statement against available evidence. ‘Not _really_. Not deep down.’

Either Ben’s gasp is indignation or he’s starting to struggle for oxygen. The former would be better, though Rey can’t help suspecting the latter. ‘It’s not about what I enjoy. It’s the principle: no one betrays me and gets away with it. Hux–’ Another gasp. Definitely the latter this time. ‘Hux knew the rules, and by making his choice he welcomed the consequences.’

‘Ben, I think you’re well aware that’s not how choice works.’

No answer. Rey would like to think he’s mulling over her words, but the bleak reality is that he probably doesn’t have breath to spare for talking. His gait is starting to change, growing shorter and more lopsided with each careful step on his splinted leg. Brag as he might, the master of pain is nearing his threshold.

They walk.

 

* * *

 

At the bottom of a shale pit, carved deep into the rock face, they finally stumble across an old mining facility. _Stumble_ is the right turn of phrase: Ben barely makes it down the side of the pit, and Rey’s running out of strength to keep catching him each time he slips. She almost wants to cry when she realises they’re looking at shelter.

The door is reinforced, built to withstand a cave-in or an ordnance accident, which seems like a great extra line of defence until Rey realises the lock panel isn’t working and she’s going to have to get it open by force. She deposits Ben against the pit wall, chalk white and glassy-eyed, and attacks the mechanism with all the ingenuity of a childhood spent breaking into wrecked Star Destroyers.

Even so, the task takes longer than she’d like. The sun is setting past the distant horizon, turning the sea of rocky grey around them even greyer and less welcoming. The stars in the sky above look calm and stationary, suggesting that the battle has ended and that recon teams will soon be descending through the ozone to find them. Finally the door opens with an ear-splitting screech that doesn’t draw even a blink from Ben.

Inside is some sort of controller’s office or facility lobby. The auto-lights come on when they cross the threshold, casting a crisp blue-white glow across the tiled floor. It’s cold inside, but the air tastes fresh enough, so the ventilation system is still clearly working fine.

As are all the locks and shutters and internal security systems. Rey takes one look at the second set of blast doors that lead down into the main excavation, and decides that where they are right now will do just fine. She helps Ben over to a row of courtesy seats beside the guard’s cubicle, and then leaves him to stare at the wall while she explores their shelter.

The old inhabitants didn’t leave much useful lying around, but if there’s one thing Rey’s well versed in, it’s making the most out of not much useful. In a cupboard behind the guard’s desk she finds a dusty old medkit. The bacta patches are shrivelled dry and the meds date back to before her birth, but there’s antiseptic and plenty of clean bandages and, best of all, a thermal blanket that will make short work of Ben’s worsening chill. In a small canteen off to the side of the waiting bay, she finds several bottles of water and an ancient pack of assorted dry biscuits still safe in their vacuum-sealed wrapper. Biscuits are by no means a survival necessity – Rey’s satchel contains a couple of tubes of emergency ration paste that will mix up nicely with the extra water and serve them just fine for nutrition – but it’s always a mood boost to know there’s plenty of food at hand. There’s no heat source, though, and no backup generator to make one out of. That’s disappointing.

Still. Rey has spent plenty of tougher nights than what they’re currently facing.

Her next and most urgent task is to see to Ben. His pain has been a nagging presence on the periphery of her view in the Force, secondhand and distant like a remembered injury or something on a holoscreen. But as time and fatigue wear him down, as he gives up on whatever pain-to-power conversion he’s been running for the last few hours, the unprocessed sensations start to leech through the cracks of a bond Rey thought she’d long ago sealed. She’s feeling flashes of what he feels, bright and sharp and too irregular to brace for, and if compassion weren’t enough to make her want to help then self-interest definitely would. It hurts. A lot.

‘Okay, Ben,’ she says as she approaches with her scavenged medkit in hand. ‘I’m afraid there’s not much I can do for you, pain-wise, unless you want to try your luck with whatever’s in this Clone War-era syringe I found.’ He’s so drained that he doesn’t even quip back. ‘But I need to clean and dress your wounds. Can you, uh…’ She swallows. There’s no reason at all to feel awkward about it. No reason for her stomach to squirm. ‘Can you take your shirt off for me?’

Ben looks at her through his lashes. Not seductive, she thinks – just conserving the effort of lifting his head. ‘Thought you’d never ask,’ he mumbles. Maybe a little seductive after all. It’s so wildly mistimed that Rey has to swallow a compulsive giggle. Fatigue must be hitting her harder than she thought.

The blood smell intensifies as he disturbs his outer layers, and his inner ones need very careful unsticking where they’ve dried fast to his ruptured skin. They’re caked with blood, more of it than Rey realised he’d lost, soaked up by the thick black fabric. The wound on his chest is long rather than deep, missing anything vital but gouging a jagged line from his collarbone all the way to his navel. She’d forgotten how broad he is – no, that’s a lie. She remembers every moment of the last time she saw him without his shirt, and maybe once he’s had a chance to heal, the new scar will suit him. But for now, at least, there’s enough gore to keep Rey’s mind off anything but the immediate necessity of patching him up.

He hisses when she applies the antiseptic, and grinds his teeth hard, but he sits very still and doesn’t try to flinch away. As she wipes the wound clean, Rey rests her free hand on his shoulder and gently, soothingly kneads the muscle there. She has no idea if it helps or not. Through the Force, there’s only pain and churning nausea.

The medkit is so old that, instead of skin glue or any kind of microstaple gun, it has steristrips to tape the torn skin back together like a grisly craft project. It takes a steady hand to get the strips to adhere to both sides of the gash, and Rey’s so focused on the task that she’s surprised, when she looks up, to find Ben has partially emerged from his daze and is watching her work with a strange look on his face.

‘I’ve used steristrips before,’ she tells him, though he didn’t ask. ‘Lot of ancient med supplies like this on Jakku. They’ve fallen out of use for a reason, but they’ll hold until we can get you to a proper medbay.’

‘Why bother?’ says Ben.

‘The more open we leave the wound, the more risk of contamination. Plus, you’ll have a much worse scar if we leave your skin gaping wide for too–’

‘Hux’ll have me executed if he can. He’ll probably let me keep my shirt on for the firing squad, so no one’s going to care what the scar looks like.’

Rey pauses. ‘Ben,’ she says carefully. ‘You can put Hux out of your mind – the Resistance is more than capable of dealing with him. What’s important is that we stabilise you until my friends get here to lift us out. You’ll be taken care of.’

Ben blinks. He’s been speaking lucidly enough, but he doesn’t look all there, and she can see the cogs turning as his brain works to manufacture a response. ‘Who says I’m coming with the Resistance?’ he says at last.

‘Please don’t start that now. Ben, you saved me.’ It’s hard to make herself say the words – it’s as though, in pronouncing them, she risks letting them off their leash to run away without her. She hasn’t had time all day to think them. She’s been too busy surviving, but now here they are. ‘You said it yourself earlier, the Order’s collapsed and there’s no place for you back there.’

‘I never said–’

‘You implied it.’ This kind of discussion has never been her strong suit, as evidenced beyond all doubt by how badly it went the last time she tried. What she’s thinking is: _You saved me. I was trying to kill you, and you had the chance to save yourself but you saved me instead, so now I know I was right about you and I’m not letting go this time._ What comes out is: ‘I’m too tired to have this fight again. You’re clearly useless at being evil, so you might as well stop trying to fool yourself and let me help you.’

Ben’s eyes fill with tears – not, this time, from pain. When she lets herself brush up against the Force bond she’s been trying to block out, she hits a storm of emotion like a solid wall. He’s lost. Bewildered. His whole world has fallen apart today and he’s too sick and dizzy and weak to make sense of it. He wants to sleep. He wants to cry. He wants to stand up and run far away on the broken leg that’s no longer willing to bear his weight. He wants to collapse against her and let the whole crumbling mess be her problem for a while.

What would she say now if she were someone else – someone more refined, more skillful, more persuasive? ‘You’ve been leaning on me all day,’ she says, and the words sound awkward even to her ears. She’s tired and drained but nowhere near as lost as he is, and the knowledge of being _needed_ gives her a fresh new surge of energy. It’s a nicer way to prop herself up than Ben’s awful strength-from-pain approach. ‘You have to have noticed by now that I’m more than capable of taking your weight. So stop worrying and just let me do this.’

When she’s taped his chest wound back together and covered it safely in sterile dressings, she wets a rag and does her best to wipe the rest of the blood off him. Partly to make sure she hasn’t missed any other wounds, and partly because the smell really is a lot, and partly also because touching Ben seems to calm him down. The knife’s edge of his misery in the Force blunts to a dull, throbbing scrape where it brushes her. His pale skin emerges from beneath the blood’s dark residue, goosebumped and worryingly cold.

In the Order, she knows – she sees it in the memories that leak into her through their bond – all injuries are treated by advanced med droids with spindly pincer arms and blank display-screen faces. The sensation of human hands soothing his hurt is one Ben hardly knows, one he remembers only in distant flashes of childhood memory. It feels nice. Carefully, thinking his feelings unnoticed, he closes his eyes and leans into the touch.

Once he's as clean as she can get him, Rey drapes the thermal blanket over his shoulders. He pulls it tight. Shrinks until the whole thing seems to engulf him, and huddles. It’s an impressive feat for such a large and dangerous man to look so pitifully small.

‘I think I’d better leave your leg alone,’ Rey tells him, because if she doesn’t fill the silence with something, she’s in danger of blurting an emotion that Ben probably isn’t equipped to handle. ‘If the splint’s held for this long then there’s not much more I can do to improve it. How do you feel?’

Stupid question. She knows exactly how he feels and the psychic weight of it is grinding her bones.

‘I’m fine,’ says Ben.

‘I’m going to get some food ready for us both.’ From her overstuffed satchel, she passes him a water flask. ‘Start by sipping this. Take it slow.’

The ration paste she brought with her from the Resistance flagship is a thick, mostly flavourless lab-grown concoction of essential nutrients. It’s designed for emergencies only – as life-sustaining and complete as it is, no one would choose it. But it’s cheap and it keeps well, and when other provisions are thin the galley cooks have found plenty of ways to improve it. It spreads well on bread, it thickens thin soups, it adds a hidden calorie kick to sauces and gravies. None of that is on the menu today. Rey briefly considers sandwiching it between two biscuits, but there’s no sense making _both_ components of their meal taste like liquefied cardboard. She saves the biscuits for dessert and settles for thinning down the paste with a bit of extra water. Gulps her half down with her back turned and then goes to offer rest to Ben.

He seems to have taken her advice a bit too much to heart, and gone so slow with the water that he hasn’t even started yet. ‘You’re badly dehydrated,’ Rey reminds him, but he clamps his mouth shut and turns sharply away when she tries to offer him the cup of ration paste. ‘You haven’t eaten or drunk all day.’

‘I don’t want anything.’

‘You’ll feel less nauseous once your stomach has something in it.'

She holds up the cup, willing it to look more appetising. Ben shakes his head and refuses to look at it.

‘Oh, don’t be childish. You know I’m right.’

Ben’s temper flares at that – or tries to, but with no strength left to sustain it, it fizzles back out at once. ‘I don’t want the fucking ration paste,’ he says.

‘Then have a biscuit.’

‘No.’

‘A sip of water?’

He shakes his head again. Rey takes a deep breath and closes her eyes. For a moment, the temptation to throttle him almost overwhelms her. It wouldn’t be hard. He’s too weak to put up much of a fight.

But there’s no point letting her own temper get the better of her. No point trying to reason with someone who’s running on an empty tank, too miserable and overwhelmed to do much more than mindlessly react to each sensation as it comes. This is another thing Rey’s not much good at. Tenderness. She has so little experience of it herself. Sitting down beside him, she puts her hand back on his blanket-clad shoulder and reaches for whatever magic had him so pliant beneath her touch while she treated him. He sags a little – sinks, if possible, even further into the thermal blanket.

She lets him lean on her. Bears his weight and strokes his lank hair back out of his face and wills her body to radiate soothing comfort.

‘Here,’ she says once his breathing has evened out, lifting the water flask and holding it to his lips. ‘You’re going to take a sip – just one small sip. That’s all.’

The new approach works. With slow, careful coaxing, Ben swallows a few mouthfuls of water and manages a bit of the ration paste. He even nibbles on the corner of a biscuit, leaning into Rey and sprinkling stale crumbs all over her lap. The food helps. His jarring, jagged presence in the Force begins to soften.

She keeps on stroking his hair. Doesn’t stop to think – doesn’t have time or energy to think – about what it feels like to have him pressed this close against her body. To be so effortlessly, non-threateningly close to him, touching all the human vulnerabilities that live beneath his layers of bravado.

 

* * *

  

There’s nothing around that they can use as a bed, but the guard’s cubicle has a carpeted floor and a pleasantly cosy feeling compared to the wide open lobby. Rey helps Ben hop through the doorway – he doesn’t even try to put weight on his broken leg anymore – and curls up beside him on the floor. Even with the thermal blanket and the slightly warmer air inside the cubicle, he’s still very cold.

Rey can’t think of a time in her life when she’s shared a bed with someone else. Perhaps she did as a very small child, but in all her living memory, she’s slept alone. It takes her a bit of shuffling to decide how she’s going to lie down. A part of her is tempted to avoid the problem by insisting she needs to stay up and keep watch. But Ben is shivering on the floor, and she knows he needs her body heat if he’s going to get any sleep tonight.

Food and rest have stabilised him, and he’s no longer spilling his pain all over her through the Force. Rey wonders how much better he’s actually feeling and how much he’s concealing from her, and how much effort he must be pouring into his renewed but feeble efforts at stoicism.

 _I’m sorry. Please don’t think too badly of me._ As their failing ships hurtled through the planet’s atmosphere, he’d had both time and skill to save himself. He’d known, of course, that she’d fired the shot that downed him. Known she was about to pay the final price for her attempt. And instead of letting her go down in flames, he’d tried to pay it for her. Going by his distress at finding himself alive after impact, he’d really believed that the crash would be fatal, and he’d fully intended to use his death to cushion her.

She lies down next to him, facing his back, and presses in close, feeling flustered and a little awkward. How will this work best? She can’t wrap her arm around him without disturbing his chest wound, so instead she finds his hand holding the blanket up to his throat and rests hers over the top of it. Strokes the back of his knuckles with her fingers. Her face is close to the nape of his neck, and he smells more like his natural self here – a scent that somehow feels intensely familiar, though she’s never been close enough to smell it before. Warm skin and sweat-salt, still lightly layered over with smoke and blood, but softer now, more human.

It’s only once she’s settled down that it occurs to her she’d have made just as good a space heater if she’d lain down facing away from him. They didn’t actually _have_ to spoon, from a medical perspective.

‘Why are you doing this?’ Ben’s voice is little more than a whisper.

She decides to pretend he’s only asking about her broadest intentions, and not the fact that she’s tracing gentle figures of eight on the skin of his cold, still faintly trembling hand. ‘Because you could have let me die,’ she says, and realises only once the words have left her mouth that they don’t sound anywhere near as brisk as she wanted them to. ‘It wouldn’t have even been your fault  – it was my mistake, I was too busy firing on you to monitor my altitude. So really, I’m the one who should be asking you that question.’

‘I don’t know why I did it,’ says Ben. ‘It happened so fast. Whatever you think it means … Rey, we’ve done this before.’

Tried to save each other, he means. Relied on each other. Left themselves open to bitter, soul-rending disappointment when it all went wrong.

‘It’s never too late for a second chance, Ben.’ He snorts at that, and she can’t blame him. It’s a platitude – the kind of thing General Leia might say in a speech meant to cheer up the masses, only General Leia would say it much better. But she’s not here, and given Ben’s track record with parental conflict, that may or may not be for the best. ‘Don’t think you can get away with walking this back. You saved my life. And it feels right, don’t you think? The two of us leaning on each other again. Sharing our strength. Sharing our thoughts.’ She’s ready to choke on the horror of all this emotional expression, but there’s no way out now except through. She can feel his chest rising and falling as he breathes beside her. ‘I’ve missed it.’

He’s so quiet she almost doesn’t hear his answer. ‘So have I.’

Emotion bubbles up from the depths, breaking the bleak surface scum of Rey’s exhaustion. It’s a strange feeling. Hot and bright and full of wanting, full of hope. ‘Ben,’ she says. Cautious – always cautious, with him. But absolutely sure she’s right. ‘It’s time to finally lay this war to rest. You know it’s true. You said it yourself, they’ll kill you if they find you here. But in that moment when we crashed, when you thought you were already done for, you didn’t care about leaving your military agenda behind, did you? You weren’t worrying about what would happen to their terror campaign without you.’

No answer. Maybe it’s not quite fair to monologue when he doesn’t have the strength to counter-argue. But strong or not – lucid or not – from the absolute stillness of his body, she knows she has his full attention.

‘You could have struck one last blow against the Resistance, by taking me out with you,’ she says. ‘But you didn’t. In what you thought were your final moments, all you wanted was to do the right thing.’

When he finally answers, Ben sounds choked. Not smoke-inhalation choked. ‘Yeah, well. I didn’t think I’d have to be around to face the aftermath.’

More honest than she’d expected, and much harsher. It’s perhaps a mark of how well Rey’s managed to physically soothe him that when she touches his mind this time, she finds more than just injury and general grief. Now there’s a brand new source of distress: shame. Self-loathing. He doesn’t want to hear her praise his deeply buried capacity for light and kindness. He doesn’t understand why she won’t just hate him and be done with it.

‘You asked me not to,’ says Rey, not bothering to pretend she wasn’t eavesdropping on his innermost thoughts. ‘You said, _please don’t think too badly of me._ It was your dying wish. Just because you didn’t actually die doesn’t mean I’m not going to honour my side of the deal.’

She doesn’t need to see his face to know when the tears start to spill. She can feel it in the tremors of his body, in his ragged breathing, in the thrum of the Force inside and around him. Scrunching her eyes shut against the echoing ache in her own chest, Rey holds him close and lets her body’s warmth do the rest of the talking.

 

* * *

 

The prickle of danger wakes her from sleep. Wide awake with no idea what disturbed her, she eases her way out from under Ben’s thermal blanket and retrieves the lightsaber from her pack. They have no view of the surface from their subterranean shelter, but she can hear the muffled hum of a shuttle landing somewhere outside, and she knows with a flash of grim intuition that it’s not the sound of her friends coming to rescue her.

The lights in the lobby have shut themselves off. But of course that’s their advantage, not Rey’s – when the First Order’s slicer droids override the door lock and storm their way in, they bring a flood of searchlights that immediately betray Rey’s defensive position at the same time as blinding her to what comes next.

She doesn’t get to count her enemies. Doesn’t get to size them up. The door’s too wide to bottleneck, the troopers are too well-armed to bother approaching slowly, and the only thing Rey can do is fight for her life.

There’s yelling everywhere. Crackling comms, shouting commanders and rapid-firing blaster rifles echo off the lobby walls. Outside, there’s the roar of more small craft coming in to back up the ground troops – and then, moments later, a barrage of defensive laser fire pouring down from the sky’s other side.

In between parries with her lightsaber, Rey catches a glimpse outside: the Resistance are here, too. Her friends have made it in the nick of time to rescue her.

But she’s cornered. Losing ground. The bolts are flying and the troopers on the ground are advancing, and it’s all Rey can do to block each lethal shot and not collapse beneath the weight of the onslaught. She hears someone shout her name – Ben’s awake, coming out of the guard cubicle, his face etched with horror and his full weight on his splinted leg. He staggers towards her, trying to fight or maybe trying to draw fire, but it doesn’t work either way. The troopers can see at a glance that Rey’s a threat and he’s not. They’ll be able to do what they want with him once they’re finished with her.

The next thing Rey hears is not a sound in her ears, but an echo in the Force that drowns out all the racket of the battle. An almighty snap. Searing, blinding, _lethal_ pain hits Rey’s leg. Pain _._ Nothing else. She’s been shot, she’s done for, there’s no way she can still be –

Standing.

She’s still standing.

She’s unhurt.

The Force around her is shaking like an earthquake. Ben advances, dark power rolling off him in sickening waves, and Rey’s never in her life seen a face look less human than the one he turns on their attackers. His broken leg is visibly askew after he stamped down hard enough to break the splint. His pain is power and it’s fueling him, feeding him, filling every part of Rey’s soul until all she knows is agony and rage.

It’s over in several brutal, blood-spattered seconds, and a cowardly part of Rey is glad the blinding floodlights don’t let her see exactly how it happens. The room is clear. The troopers are on the ground. As the fight rages on outside, the miners’ lobby is silent – just him and her.

‘Ben,’ she breathes. He’s a mess: wild-eyed, shaking all over, still radiating murder from his borrowed darkside strength. She never wants to learn how that trick works. Never, ever wants to know how he did what he just did, or why it worked.

‘Rey,’ he answers. Doesn’t step any closer. Looking at him, looking at what he’s just done to his leg, she’s not convinced he could if he wanted to.

So she does the walking for him. He looks like he’s hanging onto upright by a thread, and she quickens her step until she’s in easy catching range if he collapses.

‘Thank you,’ he says, and he doesn’t explain what he means or why he needs to say it _now_ , surrounded by dead bodies with his life hanging in the balance of who wins the fight outside. ‘And Rey – I’m sorry. Again.’

Before she can ask what he means, Ben reaches out and cups her cheek, his hand warmer now and steadier than it’s been all day. She can feel the calluses on his palm, rough wear and tear from countless hours spent gripping the hilt of a lightsaber or the yoke of a starfighter. She can feel his power, the lightless dark pouring in through the gaping hole he just tore in the fabric separating pain from insanity. She can feel him reaching past her mind, past her self-control, to hijack her nervous system like a stolen ship.

There’s nothing she can do. Juiced up on power like he is, there’s absolutely nothing she can do to fight back.

At his command, her consciousness slips and the world goes dark. The last thing she sees is his eyes locked with hers, sad and damp but hardened with resolve.

 

* * *

 

The world is thrumming gently all around her when she wakes again. She’s on the Falcon – she’d know the sound of its engines anywhere. She’s lying on the bunk in the first aid station, and Finn is standing there waiting for her to come around.

‘How do you feel?’ he asks urgently, the split second he sees her eyes open. ‘Are you hurting anywhere? What happened to you?’

‘Nothing.’ Rey sits up, too groggy to worry much about the pointless lie. ‘I’m fine.’

‘We couldn’t wake you. Your life signs were all stable and the med droids couldn’t find any damage on their scans – you just wouldn’t wake up.’

Rey rubs her eyes and looks around the hold. It’s empty.

‘Poe and Chewie are piloting,’ Finn tells her, misinterpreting what she’s looking for.

‘What about Ben? I mean–’ There’s no point asking. She already knows. ‘Kylo Ren was there with me. Did he…’

‘Ran for it,’ says Finn with audible distaste. ‘Stole a shuttle and jumped to lightspeed before he even broke the atmosphere. Guess he didn’t want to fight us and his own troops at the same time. Man, they were gunning for him _hard._ I’d love to know what happened to turn them all against each other.’ He shrugs. ‘To be honest, though, it wasn’t our top priority. We were out of there as soon as we had you on board.’

‘But he got away.’

Finn, understandably, misses her meaning a second time. ‘Hey, look, don’t worry about Ren. That asshole’s got nine lives, but we’ll get him sooner or later. I’m just glad you’re okay. When I saw your ship go down, I thought…’ He trails off.

‘I guess I got lucky,’ Rey says. Saying it makes some hard, sore scab inside her heart break open. She has to turn her face away so Finn doesn’t see the pain leak.

Ben’s out there on his own, now. Injured and weak and still, despite Rey’s best efforts, single-mindedly resolved on taking whichever path will hurt him most. It’s his choice. It’s always been his choice. Perhaps she should have listened when he warned her they’d already done this before.

But she can’t bring herself to regret getting drawn in again. At least this time, he didn’t take out any of her friends when he imploded. There’s nothing more she can do for him now. Nothing except wait and see what happens when he next emerges.

There’s no guarantee that he will, of course. No guarantee that his eyes as he knocked her out weren’t her final view of him forever. But Rey doesn’t think that’s true. For better or worse, she and Ben seem to have a knack for getting themselves entwined. And unlike others she’s wasted time waiting on, he does seem to keep on showing up.

He’ll be back. One day. She believes that.

When he’s ready.

That, too, will be up to him.


End file.
